Why Life Feels Like It Is Speeding Up (and How to Slow It Down)
By: Brian Hoeflinger, MD
September 6, 2026 | #93
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Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. Not medical advice.
Medical Trivia of the Week
A memory forms in the hippocampus, but that is not where it stays. Which part of the brain gradually takes over long term storage? (the correct answer is at the end of this email)
- A) The cerebral cortex
- B) The amygdala
- C) The cerebellum
- D) The brainstem
In Today's Newsletter
- Repetitive daily routines stop your brain from recording clear memories, which is why the years start to feel like they are speeding up.
- Your brain does not measure time. It measures change, and it quietly throws away almost everything it can predict.
- I’ll walk you through what is actually happening in there, then give you five things you can start doing this week.
Your Brain Does Not Keep Time the Way a Clock Does
I am a retired brain surgeon, and I want to tell you why life feels like it is passing you by.
Almost everyone I talk to about this says a version of the same thing. Where did this year go. My kids grew up while I was not looking. Nothing dramatic happened, and somehow eight months are gone.
That feeling is real. It is not a character flaw and it is not you getting old and slow. It is a predictable result of how your brain stores experience.
Repetitive daily routines stop the brain from recording clear, detailed memories. When every day looks the same, your brain does not track time the way a clock does. It tracks change. If nothing new happens, then days, months, and years start to blur together.
This is known as time compression. When life lacks variety, your brain compresses past days together, which makes it feel like time sped up.
What almost nobody explains is why. So let me show you what your brain is actually doing, because the mechanism is what makes the fix make sense.
You Do Not Have an Organ that Measures Time
There is no clock in the brain. Vision has an occipital lobe. Movement has a motor strip. Time has nothing.
So it builds the sense of time out of something else. When you ask how long a stretch of your life was, you are really checking how much of it you remember. A period packed with memories feels long. A period with nothing stored feels short.
Which means the honest answer to where did the year go is usually this. You did not save very much of it.
Your Brain Chops Your Life Into Chunks
Your brain does not record your life as one continuous video. It divides experience into segments, and it makes a cut whenever something meaningfully changes. A new room. A new person. A new task. Something you did not expect. Researchers call these event boundaries.
You have felt this without having a name for it. You walk into the kitchen and forget why you came. Passing through the doorway closed one segment and opened another, and the thought got left behind in the old file.
Now picture a Tuesday that looks exactly like last Tuesday. Same alarm, same commute, same desk, same drive home, same chair, same show. Very few boundaries. Almost nothing to retrieve later.
Weeks like that do not feel fast while you live them. They often feel slow. But looking back, they collapse, because there is nothing there to look back at.
Novelty is the Signal that Tells Your Brain to Save the File
When you encounter something genuinely new, your brain responds chemically. Novelty triggers dopamine release into the hippocampus, the structure most responsible for forming new memories, and that dopamine strengthens the connections that lock an experience into long term storage.
Familiar experience gets no such boost. Your brain has already seen it and already predicted it, so it has no reason to spend energy storing another copy.
Think about how a video file gets compressed. Frames that repeat are not stored again. The file simply notes that nothing changed. A routine life is a highly compressible file.
Why Childhood Summers Felt Like They Lasted Forever
Ask most adults to name their most vivid memories and a striking number of them land between the mid teens and the early thirties. Psychologists call this the reminiscence bump.
That window is not more important than the rest of your life. It is denser. First car. First job. First apartment. Leaving home. Meeting the person you married. Nearly everything was happening for the first time, which means nearly everything got saved.
By your forties and fifties, most of what happens in a week has happened before. You are competent. Your life runs well. And the very efficiency that makes you good at your life is what makes it disappear behind you.
This Is Really a Problem of Attention
There is one more piece, and it may matter most.
A great deal of adult life gets spent on autopilot. You drive home and cannot recall the drive. You eat dinner while planning tomorrow. You are in one place physically and somewhere else mentally.
Experience you do not attend to does not get encoded well. You were there. You did not record it. And you cannot remember something your brain never saved.
So a life can feel like it is vanishing not because nothing is happening, but because you were not present for the parts that did.
Five Things That Can Help
The fix is not to overhaul your life. Small deliberate changes do most of the work, because what you are really doing is manufacturing the boundaries and the novelty your brain uses to mark time.
1. Break your routine on purpose.
Take a different route to work. Eat somewhere you have never been. Move your workout to a different time or place. Rearrange the room you spend the most time in. Pick up a hobby you are bad at, because being bad at something guarantees novelty. It does not have to be impressive. It has to be different.
2. Put new experiences on the calendar.
A weekend trip. A concert. A race. A visit to someone you have not seen in years. Scheduled, not hoped for. The anticipation gets stored, the experience gets stored, and the retelling gets stored, so one planned trip creates several markers in a year that would otherwise run together.
3. Stay in the moment you are actually in.
Mindfulness gets talked about as a stress technique, and it is one. But it is also a memory technique. When you focus on what is in front of you instead of racing off to the next task, you are encoding your own life. Eat one meal a day without your phone. Have one conversation where you are not planning your reply while the other person is still talking.
4. Write it down before you sleep.
Two or three sentences at the end of the day. What happened, what was good, what you want to keep. Writing forces you to review the day, which strengthens the memory, and sleep is when your brain consolidates what it keeps. It also gives you the proof later, so when you wonder where the year went, you have an answer in your own handwriting.
5. Breathe when you feel rushed.
Slow, deep breaths when anxiety or hurry takes over. It settles the nervous system and pulls your attention back to right now, which is the only place experience can actually be recorded.
The Part Worth Remembering
Your brain is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is ignore the predictable and pay attention to the new. You are not losing time. You are just not saving very much of it.
So try one, or all, of the suggestions above and see how it goes.
Impactful Quote of the Week
"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave."
- Henry David Thoreau
All my best,
Brian Hoeflinger
P.S. - Please reply to this email and let me know if you have felt this before. I strive to read and reply to as many as I can.
Medical Trivia Answer:
The correct answer is A) The cerebral cortex
Memories form in the hippocampus, but they do not stay there. Over weeks to years, the cerebral cortex gradually takes over long term storage, a process called consolidation. It is why someone with hippocampal damage can lose recent memories while childhood memories remain fully intact.
Want to read past issues? Read the archive here.
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